Field & dream: like many in the state, this 1,200-acre Sandhills farm raised tobacco as a money crop. Now it's for the birds.

• Author: Faggart, Maury
• Position: PICTURE THIS

Some call quail a gentleman's bird. There's no need to be in the field at break of day, so a hunt at The Webb Farm usually doesn't begin until about 9, after a hearty breakfast for overnight guests. Then it's back to the lodge at noon for lunch, the kind that, if this place didn't draw such serious hunters, would have them thinking about naps rather than the afternoon's shooting, which runs to around 5. That is, unless the dogs keep pointing up birds.

It's a full day. One reason is there's a lot of ground to cover on this 1,200-acre former tobacco farm, about three miles west of Ellerbe in Richmond County. Bill Webb's family has owned the land since 1906. It's been a hunting preserve only a year, but his daddy and uncle began managing the farm for quail in 1950. "Basically, planted millet and peas for the birds and hunted it with friends," says Webb, 54, who practices law in Rockingham but lives in the farmhouse his grandfather built 100 years ago.

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Two years ago, after tobacco subsidies ended, he decided to turn a pastime into a business. "It was my idea, but Wade pushed and aggravated me to do it now, not later. I was going to wait until I was 65 or so." Wade Meacham, 43, is his head guide and also trains pointers and retrievers at Sun Dog Kennels on the preserve. Webb knew he had the perfect place--in the 1930s and '40s, the Sandhills was a mecca for quail hunters--but he had to make sure the product was there for his potential customers. "Quail declined in Eastern North Carolina due to ditch-to-ditch farming, which left no cover for birds." For more than 50 years, his family had been improving habitat. To give nature a nudge, he turned to technology.

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"The Surrogator system, especially in the first half of the season, supplies us with good-flying birds." Many preserves supplement wild quail with pen-raised birds, which are released the day of the hunt. But having lost their fear of humans, they tend not to take wing or, when they do, flutter rather than explode from the ground as wild quail do when flushed.

Webb has five of the $2,000 Surrogator...